Wall Street plans to sell shares in pro athletes' careers...

From the upcoming Portfolio magazine:
â€œTHE JOCK EXCHANGEâ€ (p. 156). Contributing editor Michael Lewis reports that Wall Street is about to launch a new way to trade professional athletes the way you trade stocks. On the proposed A.S.A. Sports Exchange, an athlete would sell 20 percent of all future on-field or on-court earnings to a trust, which would in turn sell securities to the public. â€œAs a number of smart people seem to have noticed at once, professional athletes have all the traits of successful publicly traded stocks, beginning with enormous speculative interest in them,â€ Lewis writes. â€œAmericans wager somewhere between $200 billion and $400 billion a year on sports, and between 15 million and 25 million of them play in fantasy leagues—which is to say that a shadow stock market in athletes already exists.â€ Lewis reports that in the past three years, at least a dozen baseball teams have hired the type of young statisticians you’d more commonly find working in risk arbitrage at Bear Stearns. â€œThe fans have always had an emotional investment without a [legal] financial one,â€ says a leading sports agent. â€œThis is taking emotion and putting it to financial use. Screw this putting 300 bucks into a pot at work. This is â€˜everyone get online and open your account at Ameritrade.’ â€